The present invention relates to an axle suspension for motor vehicles and, more particularly, for cross-country motor vehicles, which includes a rigid axis supported with respect to a body of the vehicle by non-guiding springs and two longitudinal links for supporting the axle body, with the respective links being each articulated movably to the vehicle body in a region of a free end of the links by way of a connection.
An axle suspension of the aforementioned type is proposed in, for example, Offenslegungsschrift No. 2,802,631; however, a disadvantage of such a proposed axle suspension resides in the fact that difficulties are encountered in constructing the axle suspensions so that they do not have an adverse influence on the bump-steering behavior of the vehicle. This would be especially true for rear axle cross-country vehicles since stabilizing measures on the front axle which counteract this effect impair the ability of twist and thus lead to poor traction conditions.
In the above-proposed axle suspension, an attempt was made to eliminate adverse influences on the handling characteristics due to bump-steering behavior of the rear axle by influencing its suspension compression curve, and placing articulation points of the longitudinal links relatively low on the chassis; however, a disadvantage of this proposed modification resides in the fact that, the ground clearance is adversely affected and, consequently, narrow limits are also imposed on solutions of this type.